It's not exciting to talk about money, but it does often take cash to keep funding the developers that improve code. Congrats to the FreeBSD foundation then, for beating their fundraising goal of $500K by almost 40%. The $690K they raised will go to funding coders, developer conferences, and some limited travel. That bodes well for continued strong support for FreeBSD in general, soon to release version 9.1 (currently at RC3).